The present invention relates generally to heat sinks, and more specifically relates to heat sinks designed for use with surface mounted semiconductor components.
Many electronic circuits require the use of heat sinks to properly dissipate the heat generated in certain semiconductor components. Current heat sink designs are generally not compatible with surface mount semiconductors and generally do not lend themselves to automated assembly.
One currently used solution to this problem is to leave a large copper landing on the circuit board in order to dissipate the heat in the semiconductor that is soldered to it. There is a major disadvantage to this approach, in that it requires a large amount of surface area on the circuit board because it is not thermally efficient. In today's increasingly compact electronics packaging, this is often unacceptable.